CLEVELAND, Ohio - On Sunday, we updated the community on what's been done in the past two years to tackle Greater Cleveland's lead poisoning crisis.

Looking to the future, we also asked activists and advocates for three potential next steps that could cement the community's commitment to prevent children from being poisoned, rather than reacting after they've been harmed.

Here are their suggestions:

Decide how to pay

How to pay for remediation or abatement for homes most at risk for poisoning children has been a sticking point.

Estimates of the number of Greater Cleveland homes that might need some repair to be safe for children range from 187,000 to 500,000 units.

The cost for that has also been hard to pin down, but will be substantial.

Federal grants, which the city and county have largely relied on to pay for cleaning up lead hazards, fix only a few hundred units at time. Fewer than 5,000 units have been remediated with this money since 1993.

For the past two years, Cleveland, the Cuyahoga County Board of Health, and the Cleveland Foundation and other philanthropic groups have discussed a model for paying for lead cleanup. That "pay for success" model involves private investors putting up the money to pay for the remediation work and being paid back through savings from lower healthcare, education and criminal justice costs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used Greater Cleveland as an example in an April report on how the model might work and what it would cost. (Read that report here.)

The Cleveland Foundation this year put $100,000 into a feasibility study with the city and county that builds off the CDC's report and looks "at possibilities for solving the resource barriers for eliminating lead in our community," said Lillian Kuri, vice president of Strategic Grantmaking, Arts & Urban Design Initiatives at the Cleveland Foundation.

Bring the community to the table

In responding to a question on lead poisoning at the City Club's mayoral debate Mayor Frank Jackson said that "anything that we've done and we've been successful at as a city, we've done as a community."

Most of the changes in how the city is tackling lead poisoning, however, have come from Jackson's Healthy Homes Interdepartmental initiative team, made up of Public Health, Building & Housing, Community Development and Law department staff.

There have been smaller collaborations with groups outside the city, such as one announced in September. That pilot project will allow student nurses from Case Western Reserve University to test preschool and kindergarten-aged Cleveland school students for lead poisoning in hopes of boosting low screening rates for the toxin.

Kim Foreman, who leads EHW, has repeatedly called for a more public process: a panel, working group or task force of experts from the health, housing, environmental and education fields, and parents of children to have public discussions on potential changes or solutions.

That, she said, is essential to get community buy-in for changes.

More legislation

Foreman and advocates that include Cleveland Lead Safe Network (CLSN) believe City Council should at least publicly consider legislation that makes it mandatory for all rental properties, daycares and home daycare providers to have "lead safe" certificates that prove their property is free from hazards and is being maintained.

If there is no mandatory standard, that also makes harder incentivize doing the repairs, they say.

Councilman Jeff Johnson introduced an ordinance that would do that and also create a fund to help low-income homeowners pay for some remediation.

The legislation has yet to be referred to City Council's Health & Human Services committee, headed by Councilman Brian Cummins.

Cummins told The Plain Dealer if the legislation was referred to his committee he would hold a hearing to discuss it.

CLSN is circulating a petition asking City Council President Kevin Kelley to assign the proposed ordinance to a committee and hold a public hearing.